While communicating, people not only exchange information, they also deal with linguistic utterances and thus regulate social coexistence. This activity includes very different acts such as informing, asking, requesting, promising or baptizing, which sometimes have very different constitutive properties. Since the groundbreaking work of Austin and Searle in the 1960s, speech acts have been an established research topic of pragmatics, which is now once again moving to the forefront of recent linguistic investigation. The interaction of sentence type, sentence mood and illocution, the form and function of different illocutionary indicators (such as sentence types, particles and intonation) and the formal modeling of sentence type, sentence mood and speech act play a central role at the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In addition, there is an increased interest in a broad empirical-experimental foundation of these models within the framework of more recent developments in experimental pragmatics. One last important point is the research of the basics of our linguistic activity against the background of current developments in the field of political communication, as the discussions about lies, fake news and bullshit show.

This summer school aims to bring excellent international students and doctoral students who are interested in the topic of speech acts from various perspectives to Göttingen in order to promote the exchange with the local participants and the invited lecturers. Within the framework of this intensive two-week cooperation, a professional as well as intercultural exchange between German and international participants is made possible.
The intensive courses in English will offer international participants the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of speech acts and gain credit points without missing courses in their own country.